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Developers take center stage in the age of cloud and containers - report

A report by IDC says that developers are taking on a bigger role in enterprise IT decision-making. (Pixabay)

In the age of the cloud, containers and Kubernetes, developers are increasingly becoming the key decision makers for enterprises.

According to a report by International Data Corporation (IDC), developers should be viewed as the key stakeholders for IT purchases as organizations move to the cloud and work on their internal digital transformations.

"The autonomy and influence enjoyed by developers today is illustrative of the changing role of developers in enterprise IT in an era of rapidly intensifying digital transformation," said IDC's Arnal Dayaratna, research director, software, in a statement. "Developers are increasingly regarded as visionaries and architects of digital transformation, as opposed to executors of a pre-defined plan delivered by centralized IT leadership."

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The study, which was based on a global survey of 2,500 developers, found that the current landscape of software development languages and frameworks is fragmented. That fragmentation not only creates challenges for current developer teams today, but also poses significant long-term implications for the support of the applications that are being built today.

Given the current environment, the study found that the languages that are most likely to continue gaining traction among developers are those that support a variety of use cases and deployment environments, such as Python and Java, or exhibit specializations that differentiate them from other languages, which is exemplified by JavaScript, along with readily available skills as staffing needs expand.

• Over 50% of dev and test applications deployed on the public cloud are ultimately deployed in production elsewhere

• Roughly 20% of developers said they are "extremely familiar" with containers and microservices

• 44% of developers have used low-code development tools professionally at one point or another.

"Developer interest in DevOps reflects a broader interest in transparency and collaboration that illustrates the trend in software development to not only use open source technologies, but also to integrate open source practices into software development," said IDC's Al Gillen, group vice president, software development and Open Source, in a statement. "Developers prioritize decentralized collaboration and code contributions as well as transparent documentation of the reasoning for code-related decisions."